This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,079 for Thursday, the 21st of March 2024.
Today's show is entitled, The Corresponding Source.
It is hosted by Ken Fallen and is about 18 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, free as in freedom is dead, long live the corresponding source.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallen and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
Previously we featured an episode of free as a freedom here in Hacker from the good folks
over at the software Freedom Conservatory.
They now have a new podcast called The Corresponding Source, which I found out about from
our good friend, Fagal Parkaster and all around Nice Guy, Dan Lynch.
And I'm posting the first episode of the corresponding source.
So you know that free as in freedom is no more and that you should switch your feeds
over to this new podcast, The Corresponding Source.
So with that, sit back, relax and enjoy the first episode of The Corresponding Source.
This is episode 0-0 of The Corresponding Source.
Hi, I'm Karen Sandler and I'm Bradley Cohen.
And this is Carresponding Source.
This is a new show that will be doing for hopefully many episodes that's going to have
lots of great information about open source, free software, software freedom and software
rights.
Yeah, I'd say it probably also digital rights, electronic freedom, digital autonomy, I'm
just being silly now, but you're not smiling.
We are in the same room this time, which we often are, we weren't in our old show.
That's right, many of our listeners who might be joining this show as we start.
We'll remember we previously had for many episodes a show called free as in freedom
that ran for quite a long time.
We had another podcast even before that.
But we're trying to do something a little bit different with this particular podcast.
Here, we're going to kind of start from the beginning.
We're going to talk about, well, first in this episode, we're going to introduce you to who
we are and why we care about these issues.
And then what we're hoping to do is have a series of episodes that are about the beginnings
and in a workings and how free software and then open source became to be and what the
things are that you need to know about issues related to policy, licensing, community, and
just generally all the information you might need to know that's not in the software itself
or the software's documentation to get involved and get excited about doing things in open
source and free software.
And our goal is to provide all of that background and introductory information, but also
to talk about some of the hot issues and more complicated subjects that come along that are
connected to that background and history.
And what we're going to have actually is two different feeds that you can subscribe to.
We know we have a lot of wonderful listeners that we like coming from our old show.
I'm sure they're very thrilled that we're back even under a new name and they're probably
going to be more interested in the more advanced topics and current issues shows we're
going to do and we're targeting this might vary a little bit but we're talking to have
every other show be one of the shows in the series of introductory information about
open source and free software and then every other show will be about more of a recent
topic and so forth.
We'll have a feed, the main feed will have both those types of shows in it and for those
who want one or the other, get a can subscribe to a specific feed for one of the other type of
episode.
That's good.
I didn't realize that's how we were going to do it.
That is how we're going to do it.
I've had this plan on my head for so long, can finally we're executing on the excellent plan
that I have devised for the future of the corresponding source.
I'm here for it.
My question is is it corresponding source or the corresponding source?
Let's explain what that means.
Shall we?
We pick this name from one of the most important and popular and famous free software
licenses called the general public license and in fact it's called in GPL version 2 the
complete corresponding source and in GPL version 3 it's defined term if you don't know what
that is.
Don't worry about it.
You'll learn in a future show called corresponding source with CNS capitalized and that's
what we took from because getting the source code is one of the most important things.
In fact possibly the most important thing that you get with your rights software rights
with open source and free software.
We're also corresponding and I hope that we're a source for an information going forward.
Did I ruin it by being too explicit about the fun other meanings of the words?
I thought the pun was obvious but maybe it wasn't.
I don't know but I like it so much that I belabored it.
I came up with it.
I like it but I came up with it.
I totally came up with it.
You get the credit.
That's great.
I'm going to start by introducing ourselves.
Can I do one to tell your story and your background and how you got involved in open source
and free software and I'll just tell us your whole life story, can I?
I was going to say sure I'd be happy to but that would take a very long time.
I'm probably not going to talk about all of the intricacies of my story during this one podcast
but we're this one episode but we'll probably come back to some of the important pieces
of the story over time.
My story sort of has like a lot of relevance to a lot of different issues about free
and open source software.
The basic story about who I am and why I care so much about these topics is that I have
a hard condition that I was born with.
It's called hyper-trophic cardiomyopathy.
It means I literally have a big heart.
So like what happened to the Grinch after he started carrying about everyone, three sizes
to large or no?
It is three sizes to large.
Wow, exactly.
It.
Yes.
And that's why you're just a wonderful person.
No.
And the whole thing is not three sizes to big.
Just pieces of it.
I see.
Parts of it are.
And really it's not just that it's so big, it's that parts of the heart are thick.
And so the heart muscle is kind of stiff and it doesn't beat properly and it's totally
fine.
I am generally asymptomatic generally.
I'm glad you're done.
I'm trying to see I know this story, but I'm trying to react to Karen's story if
I never heard of it before.
I'm trying anyway.
Bradley has heard this story like a million times.
But our listeners haven't.
So please tell me more.
Many our listeners have heard this story.
So bear with me if you can.
But please tell us more.
Well, okay.
So I'm at a very high risk of suddenly dying.
They often call it sudden death.
And so I have an implanted pacemaker defibrillator just in case I go into sudden death.
My defibrillator should shock me and I will be saved as well.
But I haven't actually needed to be shocked so far.
What has happened so far is that I have only been shocked unnecessarily.
And why would a device shock you unnecessarily?
So when I was working out as myself a young person, I was on the roar and my defibrillator
picked that up and thought that I was in a very dangerous rhythm.
And so it shocked me.
And that was just the first time.
The later on I was shocked when I was pregnant because my heart was palpitating, which
is super normal for a pregnant person when you're pregnant, your heart just can have palpitations.
And it's not a big deal if you're not pregnant.
Or if you're pregnant and you have palpitations, doctors are always like, oh, pregnant
people have palpitations.
Don't worry about it.
But when you have a defibrillator, the defibrillator picks up the palpitations and thinks, oh no,
this is a dangerous heart rate and that's what happened to me.
And it shocked me multiple times even though I didn't need treatment because it just didn't
know what to do with the information and thought I was in a dangerous rhythm.
And the only way I could reliably stop it from shocking me was to take drugs to slow my heart
rate down, which made it difficult to even walk up a flight of stairs.
So that setting was not even adjustable by the electrophysicologist or anybody else.
They couldn't adjust it once it was in your body to do different things.
Yeah, to adjust the algorithm to allow for palpitations, it's not even a conversation
you can even have.
And one of the reasons is that I'm, I mean, a decade later from when I started, I'm still
extremely young for a defibrillator patient, patients with defibrillators are only 15%
are under the age of 65 and the set of people who are pregnant and have defibrillators
is teeny tiny.
So there's no information about they don't spend the time.
And so living with my defibrillator all this time stands for the proposition that, you know,
our technology really may not be made for us and the uses that we rely on it for.
And what are we going to be able to do when it fails?
And so my heart device became a metaphor for the software we rely on and it was just,
it totally blew my mind about what this means for the technology we rely on.
What we need is a society to be able to move forward when things fail.
And you know, I've been struggling with the concept of this ever since because I can't believe
that it took me being unnecessarily shocked by my defibrillator to realize how terrible the
system we have is and I really hope that you listener don't have to wait to have your
technology fail or or or fire in some unexpected way that has negative consequences for you
before we as a society realize that we have to do things differently.
And in this case, you were primarily just asking for the very the simplest of the rights
that we talk about in software, the right to study the software.
You did initially, I think you just asked to be able to review it, right?
Right. I went to the device manufacturers and asked if I could see the source code and I just got the
complete run around.
Yeah, and you try to get it for the government too, right?
You've had a final request.
A file to FOIA, but we should explain what a FOIA request freedom information
act to ask the FDA to give you public information that should be in public.
And your ask would add and got.
I did. I, well, I got a whole bunch of documentation about various meetings at the FDA.
And I found out that the FDA doesn't review the source code on these devices.
So, you know, there's a lot of intricacies to this story.
But ultimately, what I was left with was this powerless feeling of having a device in my body
that I knew I needed, but I had no control over.
And not only that, I am not the customer for this device.
The patient is not the customer.
We don't have any purchase power.
We don't have any real generally any control at all.
It's the doctors who are the customers.
And most doctors have very little technical understanding about the way software works.
And especially when I first got this a fibrillator, they didn't even understand there was
software at these devices.
I think in the intervening time, it's gotten a little bit better, but they still have no
their doctors. They have a lot of really amazing expertise in areas of cardiology or whatever
their area of interest is, but they don't have a strong technical understanding.
They don't even know the questions to ask.
And so, when I got a new defibrillator because I needed your defibrillator is only as good as
long as the battery is good. And so, when I got a new defibrillator, my electrophysiologist,
let me be the one on the phone with the device manufacturers and I could ask them.
You know, questions about it and they, it turns out the technicians, the people that they
had available to answer questions for the doctor's offices also didn't know very much about
these devices because nobody was asking them any of these questions.
And so, it's all really fascinating. The device I have now is the only device that was available
in the United States where you could disable the wireless communication.
So, that's the one I got. But as I have my device, I continue to live with it.
And I continue to see all of the areas in which there's a mismatch between what we need to be
able to control our medical care, what we need to be able to live with our medical devices,
and simply all the technology that's integrated into our lives.
There's a mismatch between the corporations that manufacture and deploy it and sell it and profit
on it. And the ultimate use cases that are likely to happen.
My current affair related, which was installed a few years ago, still has 10 to 15 years of battery
life on it. If we look forward to that time in the future, I don't know what the world is going
to be like at that time. And this device could have software upgrades to it, but it's impossible
to anticipate what those will be. And so, we really need to have the ability to adjust that.
Companies go out of business all the time. In fact, the company that I have, my defibrillator
from has reduced its presence in the United States considerably during the time that I've
had my defibrillator. And it is now extremely challenging to get my defibrillator interrogated
at a short moment's notice, which means that it's impossible to go into any like normal regular
hospital or doctor's office and expect them to have the equipment to be able to talk to the
device get information off of it and change those settings like the one that I was talking about
before when I was pregnant. And that also might be information they would need if you had a
complication related to your condition, they would need that information quickly to be able to
treat you presumably. Potentially, yeah. So this experience, this turned you into software rights
and right to software preparedness, right? Yeah. I mean, it's wild. I started out just thinking,
oh, you know, I'm a technical person. I used to, I used to code. I went to law school. I have this
policy interest and it was sort of like, oh, you know, yeah, open source is something important.
It's cool. It's good for business, you know, whatever. It really wasn't a primary interest to me.
And then like having this experience with my medical device, it just made me realize like,
first of all, this is a story that people seem to be able to understand as a metaphor for why
we should care about all of our software. But for me personally, that feeling of powerlessness
over software that is so critical to my very well-being and like ability to function in the world
is it just really showcases why we can't, like we can't just accept what companies do.
We can't just accept the software that we are given and expect to have no ability to do anything
with it down the road unless we can keep that company in business and caring about our particular
use case. And so that's where my position is on on software freedom and lag. That's so excited about it.
But I want to also hear about you Bradley. Well, I think what we ought to do so that we don't
make our our upsets too long. Why don't we have this be our first episode? Everybody learns about
one of our co-hosts, Karen. I just told you the story of how she got excited about software rights
and the software right to repair. And then in the next episode, I'll tell my story and you can ask me
questions about it. Oh, that sounds really good. Yeah, and we're going to talk more about these
issues as we examine like the fundamentals. We'll bring back our stories and talk more. If you
have any questions about my story, if you want to know any more about it, feel free to contact us.
Yep, and they'll be contact information in the show notes. And you'll probably hear it in the
lead out as we finish up this episode. We hope you'll continue to subscribe. We welcome all our
listeners back over from free is in freedom, our old show. And we're really excited to have all
you new listeners who are excited to learn more about open source and free software. And if there
are any of the terms that you are confused about, you can feel free to write in, but you may find
many of those answers come up in future episodes as we're going to be doing lots of educational
work to explain all these different concepts about open source and software freedom to you.
I think it's going to be really fun.
corresponding source is an audio cast of the software freedom
Conservancy, a charitable non-profit organization in the USA dedicated to the right to software
repair. We're supported by your donations. Visit sfconservancy.org to learn how to support us and
subscribe to the cast. You can email us at cast as sfconservancy.org.
Hi, I'm Karen Sandler. And I'm Bradley Kroom. And this is
Karis.
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